I started out with my Beach Website in February 2008. The site is built around an Amazon Store. The major goal of any website, and especially an affiliate site, is always to get traffic, because the more traffic the more sales, right? So it took quite a few months to get my site up and getting a few customers every day. Which means my earnings weren’t great at all at the beginning. I had months were I earned nothing at all, and others where I made $3, or $6. This started increasing over time, but it fluctuated greatly.
In August of 2011, I started my personal finance blog with the hopes of teaching people how to save money after reading a magazine that featured a personal finance website in one of their articles. Due to that website, I became extremely interested in personal finance blogs, and my interest in blogging just grew from there. Before August of 2011, I didn’t even know that blogs existed. I didn’t know what they were, I didn’t know that they could make money, or anything like that.
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An affiliate program refers to the arrangement in which a merchant or owner of a product pays a certain amount of commission for the sale generated by an affiliate. The affiliate sets up a website where he/she will post affiliate links that will direct visitors to the merchant’s site so they can make a purchase. Information on commission rates are provided in the program.

Yes is the short answer. Any time you are planing on generating money, you should have a plan. No plan means no real focus. There may be some 1/1000 percent of a chance you will succeed, but I haven't met them yet. If you have already started and have generated an income, record how. Doing so will give you material for use in expanding your business faster.

First I want to just say well done with what you have accomplished. You have done an amazing job. I’m not really one to post a comment on blogs as I’m sure everyone says. But the thing that struck me the most about you is I can tell your a great individual. You love cats, as my wife and I do. We also have rescue cats. You are a very generous and honest person and that is most likely why you also have done well. Very authentic and honest. I’m in the process of building an affiliate amazon site. So I can relate to the content side of things. I’m already a customer of siteground but If I wasn’t I’d happily sign up through you. I have bookmarked your site as I’d like to come back and read a little more and keep an eye on your progress. Thanks for taking the time to write this post. It’s one of the best blog posts I’ve read. Take care Tom
Good review, Petra! One tip that I would add is that the Amazon Affiliate program (there’s another keyword repetition for you 😉 tends to work really well around Christmas time — even though Amazon’s commissions are small, people tend to be buying a lot of gifts at the same time, so if you can get them to click through your site you can end up getting credit for a lot of purchases!
Man, Ive been pulling my hair out over not really getting much from my Amazon Affil. based site. Im grateful you put this up about your experience with it. As far as you thinking you aren’t getting much back because you only sell low priced items goes, Im pushing big ticket items and it really isnt much better. Consider how much traffic you need to sell the lower priced stuff and then double or triple it to get a sale on a big ticket item.
Use Deep Links – these are pages on your affiliate’s website that AREN’T the homepage. For SiteGround’s hosting I link a lot to their speed technology page as an affiliate link. If you’re doing Amazon’s affiliate program you just want to gather a list of products you will be recommending to readers, create an affiliate link for each one, and import them to the plugin.
This was a wealth of helpful information, thanks. In the first section you described how you found your niche. Any more suggestions on how I would find a niche that would be profitable? I understand you probably want to find something that you can write good content on, but what steps would you take to make sure to validate that it will be a good niche to work on? Thanks for any help Tom.

If an affiliate changes the terms of its program, your revenues could be directly affected. Choosing the wrong affiliates can also be problematic if your blog or website audience doesn't feel compelled to buy their products or services. With the affiliate-marketing industry experiencing a boom, you’ll also have to contend with competition from other marketers shilling the same affiliate products.

Thirsty Affiliates tracks, cloaks, and categorizes your affiliate links. Once you’ve signed up for your program(s) grab your affiliate links and add them to this plugin. This can take time if you will be linking to multiple pages on your affiliate’s website (which in many cases, you should). The pro version comes with statistics but I don’t even use it and I’m quite the analytical person.
One of the most well-known ecommerce platforms today is BigCommerce. It boasts of having more than 60,000 active merchants. Many prefer this platform because of its superior functionality and countless features. It also has an affiliate program that offers big commission rates of up to 200 percent of the plan. This lets you earn anywhere from $60 to $1,500 per each sale that you’re able to secure. Its cookies last for 30 days, and it provides you not only with text affiliate links but also with banners, content and SEO advice and so on.
The best way to think about affiliate marketing is quality over quantity. There are a lot of small websites that will promote your product, but the key is finding a small number of partners that will deliver conversions. For example, an equity management services firm has over 20,000 affiliates in its system, but only about 25 affiliates generate 85 percent of revenue.
All CPA marketers put their eggs in one basket. I’ve seen plenty of the greats go from zero to hero and vice versa several time in their careers. The smart ones learn to build their own business in the process and pimp their products to CPA newbies (where the real money is). So if your only focus is to make the most money you can I would advise you not to spend it all because that business model won’t last.